Month: November 2018

• Infidel753 brings us yet another example of wingnutty intolerance, this time on Halloween. The video rebuke by Bill Maher is worth watching. Interestingly, these folks vote. Perhaps we should as well.
   
• Max’s Dad rants about the week’s atrocities and makes a persuasive case for what we must do about it Tuesday.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post lists eight important reasons we should vote three days from now.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil tells the story of a positive ad (at last!) from a Republican Congressional Representative who helped a veteran get a lung transplant. He is proud now to have the veteran’s support. Turns out the lung recipient is an unrepentant racist who advocates violence. Well, you help who you can, right? Still, I’d back off from pride at having that particular support.
   
• Six years ago, a few capitol police officers were ordered to arrest legally assembled protestors, which some did with enthusiasm despite the lack of actual charges. At the time, a politician asked what happens when police become terrorists. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson joins with conservatives to accuse that politician of saying police are terrorists. Sounds like a typical campaign season.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz describes how monstrous words, when uttered by a national leader, can produce monsters.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged reads the tweets and determines how a self-centered personality reacts after tragedy. Apt title, too.
   
• PZ Myers explains via cartoon panels how civility seems to be working out as an answer to violent hatred.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara concludes that the science of climate change is all bunk because scientific consensus has changed during the last 29 years.
   
• driftglass speculates on who is up to replace Megyn Kelly on Today. Okay, not quite seriously.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research discovers an explanation of a classic math problem: predicting the most likely routes of a drunken pedestrian wandering around the French city of Nice.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from the Huffington Post as President Trump insists he always tries to tell the truth, but bumps into a Twitter crowd who have been paying attention.
   

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Rep. Steve Chabot defends a despicable vote with an even more despicable explanation.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) expects voters to understand his vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 2013 because he thought protecting immigrants from domestic violence was a bridge too far.

At two recent debates with Democratic challenger Aftab Pureval, Chabot offered increasingly despicable explanations for his vote against VAWA, which funds critical services like rape crisis centers, community violence prevention programs, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

At their first debate, Chabot said he voted against the bill to combat domestic violence because “the Senate added a whole bunch of illegal immigrants to be covered.”

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From Frances Langum:

Excerpts:

“I want to tell you…no one paid for me to come here. No one asked me to come here. I came for myself and I approve this message.”

“If you are a woman, you need to recognize, it hasn’t even been 100 years since we had the right to vote… We as women people need to stand united & vote our values. Vote your conscience… we have discernment… you can’t be influenced by propaganda & fear.”

“When I go to the polls and cast my ballot, I cast it for a man I never knew, Otis Moss Sr. I cast a vote for my grandmother Hattie Mae Lee who died before the VRA was passed and when I stand in the poll I do what Maya Angelou said, I come as one but I stand as 10,000.”

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

…concluding that the Bible is NOT what Evangelicals claim it is, and that its words were written by humans, will not erase all doubt one might have about the existence of God. Answering these questions will get a person almost to home, but there could still be, as in the case of the person who emailed me, niggling doubts.

These doubts are the vestiges of Evangelical indoctrination. Sunday after Sunday, these “truths” were preached from the pulpits of the churches we attended. Spend enough years hearing such sermons, and you are going to think these beliefs are true. The essence of faith is believing without seeing. Evangelicals believe in God, Heaven, Hell, and the afterlife, not because they have ever seen them, but because their churches, pastors, families believe them to be true. Surely, all these people can’t be wrong, right? Actually, they can be (and are) wrong. Faith, for the most part, bypasses reason and intellectual inquiry. Evangelicals believe what they do because everyone they know believes the same. It is only when Evangelicals step outside of the Evangelical box that they see their resolute beliefs are not as solid as they think they are.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

On Saturday, Trump tried to justify his decision to hold two campaign events (a campaign rally in Illinois and a speech at an agricultural convention) the same day as a mass shooting killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And with what happened early today — that horrible, horrible attack in Pittsburgh — I was saying maybe I should cancel both this and that. And then I said to myself, I remember Dick Grasso, a friend of mine, great guy. He headed up the New York Stock Exchange on September 11. And the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day. He said — and what they had to do to open it you wouldn’t believe. We won’t even talk to you about it. But he got that exchange open.

There’s just one problem.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

We can’t specifically connect individual actions to the overall political atmosphere, just as we can’t specifically conclude that a specific hurricane is the consequence of climate change. Perhaps the bigots in Kentucky and Pittsburgh would have acted anyway; perhaps in a different political climate, the attempted bomber would have found other targets.

What we can do, however, is face the climate honestly. And the truth is that people who watch the news within the Republican-aligned media, and listen to Republican politicians including the president of the United States, are being fed a nonstop diet of crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories.

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From nojo at Stinque:

America always turns into a bad-faith ethics seminar in moments like this. Where the conversation should be moral — and political — we jump to legal framing. Of course no one is responsible for the deeds of another. Any system of justice that cast implied blame would be heinous, and heinously manipulated. It is the man who sent the pipe bombs whose guilt must be proved in court, not the man who egged him on.

But the law is limited that way, and understandably so. The law is the state, and the state must be constrained.

We are under no such constraints.

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